Friends Of Animals Not Helping State’s Endangered Fawns

Animal rights is a noble cause that would seem to preclude advocates from using deception.

But national animal rights groups, with big financial obligations to pay their high-salaried figureheads, are more interested in stoking hotlines for donations than they are for marketing the truth about wildlife management.

The most recent propaganda mailed to newsrooms across the country comes from a Connecticut-based animal rights group.

“As a result of a lawsuit by Friends of Animals,” the press release said, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to immediately halt its program of trapping and killing coyotes in the Pacific Northwest.”

This is not true. The FWS agreed to stop trapping coyotes only on the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Washington.

The release gloats about the Friends of Animals’ crusade against predator control, but only hints that the refuge’s temporary program to trap coyotes was an emergency response to protect the fawns of white-tailed deer.

Not just any whitetails, either.

Nowhere does the release mention that the coyotes were on the verge of wiping out the last flood-ravaged remnants of endangered Columbian white-tailed deer.

The Julia Hansen National Wildlife Refuge is on the lower Columbia, with units in Oregon and Washington.

The 2,000-acre refuge was established in 1974 to protect the dwindling Columbian whitetails, which were added to the federal list of endangered species in 1972.

The deer had recovered sufficiently by last fall to prompt federal and state biologists to consider removing the sub-species from the endangered list.

A few months later, however, February floods wreaked havoc with the islands and diked areas of the refuge where the primary Columbian whitetail herd ranges. The flooding caused a high percentage of losses among the deer.

“For about 20 years before the floods, the average number of whitetails on the refuge was more than 265,” said Susan Saul, FWS spokeswoman in Portland. “After the floods, we counted only 54.”

The number was so low, federal biologists said drastic action was needed for two or three years to protect new generations of fawns. Coyotes, the chief fawn predator, would need to be controlled.

But the scenario was even worse than biologists had anticipated.

Virtually NONE of the whitetail fawns born in the spring of 1996 survived - a critical point the Friends of Animals press release does not mention.

A biologist who’s been on the refuge for more than 20 years used radio collars to monitor 12 fawns born that spring. He was stunned to learn that all of the fawns wearing collars perished. At least 10 of them fell to the teeth of coyotes.

Under normal circumstances, natural predator-prey relationships are allowed to occur on refuges. But this was an emergency, Saul said.

“Biologists believed that if something wasn’t done immediately, we could lose the entire genetic group of deer on the Washington side of the river in a few years,” she said.

“We put together a plan based on biologists’ recommendations: a short-term predator control program prior to the does dropping fawns.”

No one suggested an attempt to wipe out coyotes. The plan was simply to give fawns better odds while they were young and vulnerable.

Friends of Animals didn’t care. The group spewed propaganda that spurred several hundred protest letters.

To their credit, the FWS biologists put on their flak jackets before fawning began last spring and trapped coyotes despite the anti-trapping campaign.

The odds against duping a coyote into a live-trap are very high. Therefore, the FWS contracted a professional trapper to use padded traps that caught and held the animals, Saul said. “Then he euthanized the animals in the traps. It was all done as humanely as possible.

“They trapped nine of about 20 coyotes on the refuge,” Saul said. “The result has been gratifying. As of November, 76 percent of the 17 fawns fitted with radio collars this spring have survived.”

Should it hold true for the entire generation of fawns, the survival rate would be the highest recorded at the refuge, up from a typical rate of 10-20 percent, she said.

“That gives you some perspective on what removing nine coyotes from the refuge did this year,” she said.

The Friends of Animals weren’t impressed with the success of emergency trapping. The group filed a suit that may force a lengthy environmental impact study that could scuttle the limited trapping scheduled for next spring.

“Barring another natural disaster, the biologists think we might need only one more year of coyote control before the deer population stabilizes,” Saul said. “We hope to have a decision (on the lawsuit) so we can do some trapping before fawns drop this spring.”

Meanwhile, with friends like the Friends of Animals, the deer don’t need any more enemies.

You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.

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